One of the ways I understand chaos magick, inspired by something I read but don't remember what, is this: the world is chaotic by nature, and order or disorder is the result of how you look at it. Stuff is however it is, but it is our interpretation of it that gives it meaning. A student may have an insanely messy room, but he knows exactly where everything is, so to him it is ordered (not to get too autobiographical). This is why belief shifting works. We can literally change how ordered things are by changing our interpretation of them. Why is a raven like a writing desk? Well, the answer's up to you.

Most methods of divination produce essentially random results. You can't really try to pick a certain tarot card, or roll normal dice in a certain way, with any degree of accuracy. But reality itself is just as chaotic. By forcing ourselves to interpret a fairly random set of symbols and make sense of them, the diviner is mimicking the process of experiencing reality itself. This is both how and why divination works.

So when someone says, "how can you know anything about reality by looking at a deck of cards? Isn't it all just up to chance?" you smile and say, "exactly."

"The customer is usually wrong; but statistics indicate that it doesn't pay to tell him so."
-Aleister Crowley

I like it. Though I am more inclined towards divination methods that I dot not physically touch. I realized that there is a level of connection between the divinatory method and the practitioner, but I prefer to take the "you are doing it subconsciously with your hands" out of the picture.

For me that means I prefer to turn more mundane divinatory methods into digital, but it could also be something as simple as using a cup/bag to hold the dice/sticks/coins and tossing it from there.

- Vap0rWar3To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings

Stuff is however it is, but it is our interpretation of it that gives it meaning.

I really think this is one of the most important things to learn in life, and the point of magick. Everyone has their own little reality tunnel where they interpret their experiences in terms on their beliefs. Magick allows us to take a step back and change our beliefs and experiences.

I agree with you about divination but I would also add that The Hermetic Principle of Correspondence implies that what happens in the macrocosm of the universe corresponds to what happens in the microcosm of ourselves so I take that to imply that the act of casting a divination is just giving our minds permission to interpret the microcosm as the macrocosm. Which I suppose it's pretty much what you just said hehe.

Vap0r, I actually always had the opposite feeling about divination. I always had a hang up with digital methods when I learned that an algorithm can't generate a really random number. Is that still a thing?

I started making an android app for the forty servants digital deck, and I have it generate a loop of random numbers until the screen is tapped which stops the process and chooses the number, but the process seems overly complex and I'm not sure about it.

I use the three coin method of I ching divination, and I throw the coins into the air a bit to make sure they are truly random. It works very well.

“Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality.
Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.
The two are rarely compatible.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic

Yeah.. the randomness generated by computers is based on the level of entropy and it is finite, because of manufacturing specs.

I do like the option to click the screen to pause it on a pic.

For security purposes, any software that is drawing from the randomness of a computer, generally requires some level of human intervention, such as mouse movement, shaking your phone, etc.

However, I am not that concerned, because in this case we are talking about randomness in regards to being able to recreate the situation. For example, if I run a command for my server to output ASCII text as an interpretation of /dev/urandom and someone took the exact same computer and did the same thing on a different day, at the same time of day, and other factors, there is a chance that they could get the same result. That chance is proven mathematically, and while it is small, for the purposes of high end security, its not small enough.

Which is why when you have those little tokens, like the RSA kind, that generate random numbers, they use the random number generation, plus a secret pin that you know, plus some ridiculously huge prime numbers they have computed way back when with super computers, coupled with an algorithm to get REALLY REALLY random numbers. Technically thats not random either.. just like tossing coins isnt really random, as we know that statistically you will get a certain number of results over a period of time.

Thats for encryption, but if we look at making hashes of files (MD5s), those arent random either. The ability to alter a program/file and get the same MD5 exists, and those are called collisions. So in an effort to get a more unique MD5 hash, we can sample "random" portions of the file/program, but even though can be spoofed and overcome.

So, all of that to say, random isnt random, but some random isnt random enough.

For my purposes, I think computers are random enough for divination.

- Vap0rWar3To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings

Interestingly, one of the first programs I ever put into a computer manually was a I ching program.

This was way back in the 80's. I had a zx spectrum which had an amazing 16k RAM!

Back then you could get monthly magazines which had BASIC programs that you could type in yourself.

There was an I ching program which at the time sounded super spooky. The last line of the program deleted the whole program I guess to stop you just generating loads of hexagrams and making it pointless.

So I deleted that last line and totally felt like a hacker lol.

I had no idea what the I ching was, I was about 10 years old hehe.

Haven't thought about that in years. Now I feel old.

“Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality.
Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.
The two are rarely compatible.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic

Yeah, i have tried the one on the discord server a few times but never with a serious question, just checking it out.

I prefer using the coins and the book. I have had my copy of it for about 25 years and it's really old and creased. I keep it wrapped in a black cloth and have a little black bag for the coins. I have had different coins at different times though, but I never use coins that are in circulation in the country I live in. My current coins are tiny one peso coins from Chile,. I was using big greek ones but they felt too big in the hand. I also have a black book and fountain pen I use to record the results. I like the ritual of it.

I really want a set of those old Chinese coins with the square hole in the middle, might do a sigil for them soon.

“Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality.
Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.
The two are rarely compatible.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic